The 80's Called And Awarded RadioShack Best Super Bowl Ad

If we can get past Jo Namath's coat, we can get into what went on last night during the Super Bowl. The Broncos tanked. You all saw that. Or maybe you didn't since, like us, you were just there for the ads.

Sadly, this year, there were no breakouts. No Clint Eastwood. No Paul Harvey. No Mean Joe Green. But there was RadioShack, a brand that has, despite all odds, managed to service the digital revolution.

In a somewhat brilliant razzing of itself, the brand, in the form of a phone call -- "the eighties called and they want their store back" -- pulled out all manner of the decade -- Hulk Hogan, Mary Lou Retton, Twisted Sister, Alf, Erik Estrada, Hulk Hogan, Chucky, John Ratzenberg, Teen Wolf and others. A stoke of genius, actually, for a brand that, in truth, was stuck in the eighties and sorely in need of a makeover. Which is exactly what this spot gave it. We love it when Super Bowl ads (or any ads) are actually relevant to the needs of the brand. Which is why we're giving Radio Shack top honors.

If we had to select four more to make a top five, we'd tip our hat to Budweiser for Puppy Love, Audi for Doberhuahua, Coke's It's Beautiful and Cheerios Gracie. And for pure Super Bowl hubris, we give honorable mention to Maserati for Strike.

Where's Seinfeld, you ask? Oh it's still there. Just Google it. Like we had to. In order to find out who the brand was behind it.

Real-Time Marketing

On the real-time marketing front (yes, we can hear you groaning), it was quite an active night. But all in the wrong way. You've heard of the term, echo chamber, right? Well that's what it was like last night on Twitter. You couldn't follow a hashtag feed without witnessing one brand interacting with another. It's like all the social media managers for big brands decided to pull out the sandbox and play with each other. Great. Some of the activity was quite hilarious. But we think the brands forgot to invite consumers.

So what did work last night? Oreo brilliantly sitting out the game and announcing that fact with a tweet before the game began.

As the game began, everyone began to wonder if the JCPenney account had been hijacked because it appeared the person behind the account was tweeting while drunk. And true to the echo chamber effect, other brands piled on to poke fun while pimping their own wares. But in a small scale stoke of genius, the brand later revealed it was just #TweetingWithMittens. Metrically speaking, JCPenney killed with this in terms of retweets, besting other brands by far.

Our personal favorite for the night on the RTM front was Newcastle Brown Ale. Continuing its strategy of being in the game without actually being in the game, The brand "remade" many of the spots with ran during the game in cartoon form. Some were quite funny. But, yes, this was a bit in the echo chamber corner of things.

And we're going to give a nod to Volkswagen. Pulling out all the stops, the brand had a full on, social media center set up specifically for the Super Bowl complete with the actors who appeared in their Wings commercial making real-time mini ads throughout the game. But again, it was mostly VW interacting with other brands. But in reaction to the fact some noted the brand's spot focused solely on men engineers getting their wings, the brand came out with this:

What else happened last night? Well Time Warner had a mini-fail. As the brand touted its greatness with an ad, the brand lost its standard definition feed in LA in the second quarter and it didn't come back until late in the third. That said, many subscribers view the HD feed which was not interrupted.